Happy Haloween. Please enjoy this Photo of Oscar nominee and birthday girl Sally Kirkland wearing a live tarantula Halloween isn't only for trick or treating and costume parties though it is most definitely for those things. It's also home to many fine birthdays and events on this day in showbiz history...
1795 Poet John Keats is born. Two hundred and fourteen years later Ben Whishaw plays him beautifully in the still undervalued Jane Campion movie Bright Star
1864 Nevada becomes the 36th State. Without Nevada no Las Vegas, one of the favorite cities of filmmakers and storytellers. It is entirely untrue that what happens there stays there -- it's always broadcast!
1879 Oscar nominee Sara Allgood (How Green Was My Valley) is born in Dublin
1892 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle publishes the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Movies and TV haven't shut up about the Great Detective since they were invented as mediums.
1906 George Bernard Shaw's Caesar & Cleopatra premieres on Broadway. 39 years and 11 months later the film version starring Vivien Leigh is released.
1922 Barbara Bell Geddes of Dallas and I Remember Mama fame is born in NYC
1925 Oscar winner Lee Grant (Shampoo) is born. Have you read her recent autobiography yet?
1926 Harry Houdini dies
Mount Rushmore, River Phoenix and more after the jump...
1941 Happy 75th Birthday to the inimitable Sally Kirkland, of Anna Oscar nomination fame and many shameless antics before and after! On this same day Mount Rushmore is also completed so happy 75th birthday to that iconic monument, too, and its genius use in Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest (1959)
1950 John Candy is born in Toronto, immediately discovers "those aren't pillows!"
1957 Brian Stokes Mitchell is born. Becomes a musical theater Broadway star but TV is still wasting him -- you gotta use those wondrous pipes!
1960 Arnaud Desplechin is born in France. Starts making wondrously idiosyncratic but very longwinded movies thirty years later including our two favorites Kings & Queen (2005) and A Christmas Tale (2008)
1961 Three time Oscar winner Peter Jackson is born in New Zealand. Discovers Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet and makes The Lord of the Rings resonate for the 21st century.
1963 Dermot Mulroney, not to be confused with Dylan McDermott, was born on this day
River Phoenix at the Oscars in the late 80s with then girlfriend Martha Plimpton
The Viper Room after Rivers' death
1993 Generation X's Heath Ledger moment (sniffle) as the great young Oscar nominated actor with an enormous career ahead of him River Phoenix dies of a drug overdose in the early hours of the morning outside of the Viper Room in LA. Also present that awful night: Flea and actors Johnny Depp, Samantha Mathis, Joaquin Phoenix and Rain Phoenix. River was on a break from filming the thriller Dark Blood with Judy Davis. The film was never released though an incomplete version had a few festival showings a few years ago shortly before the director George Sluizer's death at 82 years of age. Sluizer had come to international fame with the harrowing Dutch hit The Vanishing (1988) which he also remade for Hollywood
2002 A federal grand jury indicts Enron's CFO on 78 counts of terrible things like wire fraud and obstruction of justice. Three years later the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room about the whole sordid scandal is nominated for the Oscar (but loses to marching penguins)
2003 Bethany Hamilton's arm is eaten off by a shark in Hawaii. Her story is later made into the sleeper hit Soul Surfer (2011) starring AnnaSophia Robb
and
2016 Calum Marsh and Paolo Kagaoan win cinephile Halloween doing Toni Erdmann and the Moonlight poster as costumes in Toronto